Performances and identity building: a study of embodied memories through oral narratives

Abstract

This Undergraduate Research Project, aims to study the concepts of memories, remembrance, performances and identity related to a specific perspective called "embodied memory" (Hyden, 2013). Such perspective will be explored from the construction and analysis of a narratives' corpus. The narratives will be produced by members of a family and will focus or motivate their own narrative performances about a countryside childhood. The narratives will be generated through interviews, from a script initially prepared and recorded with audiovisual equipment (photos, filming and recordings). Field annotations and subsequent transcription of the recorded data will be used. This Undergraduate Research Project will be organized in three key strands: 1) a more specific bibliographical research on the concept of embodied memories; and more general about the concepts of memories, remembrance, narratives, performance, with emphasis on the field of linguistic and anthropological studies. 2) a fieldwork aimed at conducting interviews, which will be recorded and transcribed, with several members of a family living in the countryside of São Paulo, in the city of Martinópolis, composing an appropriate audiovisual corpus for the analysis of linguistic and embodied aspects of narratives; 3) a paper about the generated narratives themselves, which seeks to study and understand the importance of considering the embodied aspects of narrative practices and the contributions, both theoretical and methodological, of this type of research for multimodality and linguistic research (Mondada, 2016; Streeck et al, 2011; Cruz, 2018) which has grown in the last years.